The Daily Beast Podcast - There’s Only One Acceptable Response to Trump’s Talk of a Third Term

Episode Date: April 1, 2025

The New Abnormal host Andy Levy and guest host Jeb Lund think there’s only one way to respond to President Donald Trump’s talks of a third term and it isn’t polite. Then, activist and author Sandy Hudson stops by to discuss her new book, Defund: Black Lives, Policing, and Safety for All. Plus! Tech journalist Brian Merchant joins the podcast to talk about all things propaganda and protest in America’s new era. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hi, I'm Andy Levy, former Fox News and CNN-HLN guy, and current cable news conscientious objector. I'm a former libertarian who now sits pretty comfortably on the left. Hi, I'm Danielle Moody, former educator and recovering lobbyist. But today, I'm an unapologetic, woke commentator on America's threats to democracy. And I'm producer Jesse Cannon, and I'm here to make sure things don't go too far off the rails. We're here to have fun, smart conversations with some of the most knowledgeable and entertaining people in politics, media, and beyond. Our goal is to try and make sense of our current crazy world, our new abnormal, and hopefully even make you laugh through the tears. What a great show we have for you today.

The founder of Black Lives Matter Canada, Sandy Hudson is here to talk all about her new book to fund Black Lives, policing, and safety for all, and why she thinks real public safety means divesting from police and investing in communities. Then, tech journalist and author Bryant Merchant joins us to talk about how protest and propaganda are shaping the new era of American power. But first, let's have some fun. Hey, welcome to the new abnormal. It's me, Andy. Danielle is not with us today. She is on assignment. Actually, she's just traveling. So joining me instead is some guy. Jeb Lund. He is a journalist whose writing has appeared in such places as the Guardian, Vice, Rolling Stone, Gawker, and the New Republic. He's also the co-host of the Quaid and Full podcast and the It's Christmas Town podcast. And he is a frequent guest here on the New Abnormal. Jeb, thanks so much for joining me today. Andrew, it is a pleasure to be back. So what should we talk about? Let's talk about restoring truth and sanity to American history, because I think we can both agree

that it's about time. Right. Yeah, I went to college, and there was too many interpretations of things, and I'd like it to get them down to one. Yeah. So Donald Trump, he is the president. Still. He put out an executive order a few days ago called Restoring Truth and Sanity to American

history. If your first guess is that the executive order would not, restored truth and sanity to American history. You continue to the next round. So congratulations on that. Basically, what he is trying to do here is take over the Smithsonian Institution. And he wants to, I'll use his words first. He's upset that the Smithsonian American Art Museum features an exhibition called The Shape of Power, Stories of Race, and American Sculpture. Because it talks about societies, including the United States, using race to establish and maintain systems of power privilege and disenfranchisement. He's very upset that this would be out there in the open, and he wants it very much to be back in the closet where it belongs.

Basically, what he's trying to do is kill the independence of the Simpsonian institution, and he's trying to rewrite and whitewash American history, in my opinion. Jeb, agree or not? I agree, but I also think that the best way of characterizing it is he's trying to footloose. history. Like, history is not cool. But if you ban it from the small town, you're going to make it cool. I don't think the Czech people really wanted to spend the 80s sitting around reading Vachlov Hallow essays. That's not what happy people do, right? Like, you go to the club. You get some sausage, you get a little Pilsner, you get geek to go out with your buddies to the club. I don't think that they've really thought, I mean, obviously, they haven't really thought this through beyond, like,

we do not want to feel bad about the systems of power and control that we capitalize on. And historically that people like us capitalized on. But for a campaign and an apparatus like Donald Trump's, which really is sort of insurgent, like I don't know how you don't realize that you're just driving these topics to the same mechanisms such as they exist on the left and everywhere else on social media. Like, I don't think people really want to care about the Smithsonian Institution unless they've got like five days in D.C. and they've got to figure out what they're doing. But now you have people who don't care about this, you do. It's very, very dumb. Yeah, no, I think there's a lot of truth to that. I do think that, you know, as we've seen with book bannings in places like you were beloved Florida, what they did to new college, which I believe you are familiar with, and what they've been doing under the guise of eliminating so-called DEI programs with erasing black people from American history, erasing other people of color from American history, women, queer people. And I feel like this is just more of the same. This is clear.

Clearly, one of the key pillars of this administration is trying to erase the history of this country with regard to minorities and also erase the achievements of minorities who managed to do things despite the very real. Well, I was going to say racist tendencies, but that seems to be underplaying it. You know, despite the very real obstacles that they faced. in a society that was set up from the beginning for white men. Yeah, no, I mean, like, I feel you're right on that. And I think this is very much like kind of a boomer brain sort of phenomenon. Like, this is a clock you can roll back if you stopped learning about this stuff when you left college 40, 50 years ago.

But, you know, as much as it's fueled by like kind of a reflexive backlash against the existence of Obama and a black president, it just the fact that we had Obama. indicates how much this is closing the barn door after the horses have come back. Like the idea of this sort of diversity being popular is, you know, at least like a couple decades old at this point. Like we've saturated a few more generations with like Frederick Douglass is a hero. Let's know everything about Frederick Douglass. The Tulsa massacre wound up on HBO on a premier peak TV series.

These things have entered the consciousness and they're not going to exit. it. So I'm outraged, of course. I've discussed it like the, you know, the Smithsonian sort of the museum, I can't remember the proper name for it, dedicated to the African American experience in America. It's just a gorgeous building. It's amazing. Like all their exhibits are lovely. And I'm very frightened for what's going to happen to those collections. But in the aggregate, like, it's trying to footloose this stuff. You can't make this uncommon knowledge again. You know, if you've got idiots on TikTok who can just rattle off stuff about, you know, instances in which America bombed black people within its territory, you know, like, you're,

you're not going to unring this bell. Yeah, I agree. I think ultimately it's a fool's errand, but I think it does damage along the way. By the way, the actual name of the museum is the National Museum of African American History and Culture. I guess I'm a slightly better ally than you because I know that. I actually only know that because I have opened in front of me an article from The Guardian, which reminded me that Trump visited this museum in 2017.

And as The Guardian writes, his reaction to the Dutch role in the global slave trade was, you know, they love me in the Netherlands. Which is, you know, that's our boy. That's our boy right there. Look, the bottom line here, at least for me, is, you know, it's mostly what I said before. but there are certain words they love to use, and one of them is divisive or divisive, depending on what mood you're in. In this executive order, one of the things that Trump says is that the Smithsonian has,

quote, come under the influence of a divisive, race-centered ideology. It's never divisive if it's about white people. It's only divisive when people who aren't white or who aren't men raise their hand and say, hey, we did stuff too? And then suddenly that becomes divisive. And apparently the way you get rid of divisiveness is you simply, again, you simply erase those people from American history. And then we are one big white male, straight, God-fearing Christian nation. Right. The easy argument, I think, and the argument that Democrats don't make very clearly is that it's not division if we say, this is all our history. When you're in this country, you are inheriting a culture that is shaped by

this history and we can reject parts of it, but it all belongs to us. And you don't have to articulate what's yours and what is not. But like the Trump administration and the conservative approach overall, it's pretty, I think this is just a kind of the natural culmination of what you've seen in the rhetoric about, let's say, like the killing of Trayvon Martin or the uprisings in Ferguson, where racial division is the act of noticing racism. Like racism is a, a latent and inactive property until one of its victims detects it. Right. So if you do something that is racially discriminatory, that's fine.

That's procedure. But when the victim goes, ow, you're hurting me, then they are causing an uproar that is divisive. It's sort of like saying it's not domestic abuse unless your wife cries after you hit her. The result here is just what Adam Serwerves, you know, is called like the great resegregation. And as I said earlier, I don't think it can work. and I don't think this reasoning obtains for long, but like you said, it's going to destroy some of our cultural legacy and our sense of self for a while until we can reconstruct it. So, yeah, and the thing is Trump is now apparently making noise about having even more time

to try to destroy our cultural heritage. He, in an interview with NBC News on Sunday, said that he is, he's not ruling out the idea of running for, a third term as president. That's nice for him. Yeah, no, it is nice for him. And his quote was, a lot of people want me to do it. But I mean, I basically tell them we have a long way to go. You know, it's very early administration.

And he said, I'm not joking. There are methods which you could do it. Jeb, what should the response to this be? Fuck no. This is something that really bothers me from a journalistic perspective because this issue continues to be framed as like, well, there's two sides to this conversation. This is really not one of those. This is kind of a black letter law sort of thing where you can just go, no, he can't do that. And I object strongly to the discussion about it that couches it as permissible or reasonable from a

certain point of view. All that really is is laundering this as a possibility. This is one of those things that needs to begin and end with fuck no. Or you can start with no if you want to be more polite. Maybe I should have done that, too. Andy, I'm sorry if I'm causing a disturb of ruckus on your podcast. No, no, that's okay. We don't definitely go for politeness here. I want to read you something that Lawrence Tribe, who taught at Harvard, I believe, for like 50 years, taught constitutional law. He wrote on Blue Sky, anyone discounting a third Trump term per the 22nd Amendment and the 12th Amendment is thinking magically. The 22nd doesn't bar serving a third time, only being elected three times. The 12th doesn't bar running for vice

president unless ineligible to serve as president, but Trump isn't ineligible. So in other words, he is positing or postulating theory under which say J.D. Vance could run for president in 2008 and select Donald Trump as his vice president. And then after being elected, J.D. Vance could resign the office, which would then go to Trump. Does that affect your rudeness level at all? Well, I'm going to censor myself here. No. I saw that post by Tribe.

I also saw like the 30 responses like in a just a tree of escalating outrage beneath it from other people who teach constitutional law saying, Larry, get your head out of your ass. Just in sort of my lay understanding of the Constitution, I also feel like this is get your head out of your ass, Larry kind of thing. most of these law discussions really do seem to start and end with like what if a brain and a vat could imagine this thing, which is, I think, had some really fantastic effects for our society where everything about justice is just a thought experiment where nothing that will be affected by the downstream consequences is real. But, you know, this brain and a vat tendency also has, tends to lead to something that like one of my older relatives used to say, which is, you know, That boy's so smart, he thought himself stupid.

Yeah, look, I'm with you. I think Larry is, I'm trying to think of a polite way to say this. I think I'll just join you in saying no. Is this your homework, Larry? Because it got neff. Exactly. It's the brain in a vat. Was it a vat or a jar?

Either one. Okay. Vat's just like a larger jar, but not lit it, I think. That's true. It's still on the same sort of like cylindrical width. It also all sorts to sound like, a bunch of college sophomores got stoned. What if Trump could, you know, yeah, he can't run, man.

I get that. But what if? And it just all starts to sound like that. And I don't mean that in a good way. No. On one level, Jeb, I completely agree with you. And I do think there's a media problem with this being cast as a both sides thing and writing these articles with headlines that if you don't know anything about it, lead you to

believe that this is an open question. The flip side of that, though, is I don't think we can afford to just shrug and say, no, he can't do, this is just Trump being Trump. This is stupid. There's no way he can do this. Because if there's one thing we've learned, or we should have learned, is that there's a lot of things that he says where you say, well, that's stupid. Making Canada the 51st state, for example. Yes, that's stupid. But we can't just sit here and roll our eyes and say, ah, that's just Trump being dumb, because it is. has effects. In that sense, I do think, and I'm not saying you disagree, but I do think it has to be taken seriously. Sure. I think, though, in the scenario you're describing, and not that I think it's flawed by any stretch, but like when we have these hypotheticals, can Trump do this? And we say no, part of the structure behind saying no is assuming that all the institutions of government continue to believe that they function in the way they're said to by the founding document of the nation, no, he can't do that. So like, yeah, there's a lot of stuff that he's been able to do

because we've presumed that the people who would have an institutional or just pure, like, you know, arrogant personal self-interest in saying, no, you can't do that, haven't. So, yeah, I mean, what's the alternative in this case? I mean, I think maybe if you write these articles, you don't frame it in an eye-catching, speculative, click-baiting, whatever headline that says this is an open discussion. You can go ahead and present that theory that he might articulate whatever it winds up being down the road as quickly as possible and you sandwich it, sandwich it between no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. You can't cede the discussion only to his eerily speculating on it.

And in that case, that that's on the Democratic Party where they have not institutionally stood up and said, we need to own the right to say no. We need to continue articulating no so that this isn't just a theory that people hear and that with repetition over the course of the next four years starts to sound more reasonable. Yeah, I completely agree with that. say that we have to take these things seriously, I mean as statements of intent from him. And you're right, that is exactly how it should be covered. And another perfect example of this is Greenland, which apparently is not just a very underrated Gerard Butler movie, but also an actual place.

It is not, as I was led to believe, similar to Narnia. It does exist. It is a fairly decent-sized country that looks even bigger, thanks to the wonders of the Mercator map. And Donald Trump has been saying now for months. I can't even remember if he started this nonsense before he was elected or after, but he has been talking about annexing Greenland, about taking it over. It was one of those things where when he first said it, you're like, what the fuck is this idiot doing now? And again, it's so tempting to just think, all right, he saw an infomercial. on Fox and somehow that led to this and he'll forget about it by tomorrow. And here we are months later, we've got the vice president of the United States and his wife visiting the country with sort of

the express aim of pitching this idea and not being received all that warmly. But the bottom line is, again, as a statement of intent, we have to take it seriously because somehow he means it. Yeah. You know, before I go any further, I'd kind of like to take your audience behind the scenes a little bit here. Please. Fans of the new abnormal, thank you for tuning in. I just want to say, like, I'm friends with Andy in real life, and he brings up Gerard Butler movies pretty much whenever possible. I do. Just like, you know, if he could just sandwich that one in there, he will. National Treasure. I'm not sure how this wound up on his radar, but if I had to guess, he was talking to some tech fascist who was talking about the need for rare earth elements for

their new inventions going forward and how. global warming is going to make Greenland really green, and that will be really key real estate for us to hold. I don't think Trump's ever going to articulate it that way. But I think that's the only way that this makes sense is if you're thinking about a climate change future, and you're thinking about in the reactionary sort of concept of how to adapt to climate change, which is basically just putting up the walls and maintaining a little tight ethnocracy and keeping hold of your resources and keeping everybody else away from them, then it makes sense. But it's sort of like the Canada thing. Or, you know, if you want to be really cynical, sort of like our invading Iraq in 2003.

Okay, great. How are you going to do it? What are you going to do with it in the long run? And so, like, on one hand, I am worried. Anybody who like sort of when he pretends that he likes to read talks about collections of Hitler's speeches, getting into wars of territorial conquest for resources, for controlling the future. That doesn't go well. What about for Labens Realm? Right. Yeah. I mean, so sunbathing room, sure, but getting to the point of how are you going to keep it? Who are you going to get to keep it for you? These are problems that we have a really tough time answering even when our presidents are not insane. We do not have a military large enough to maintain sort of territorial control of something like that without a real commitment from people who are not going to want to make it, who are not going to want to pay for it in blood or in treasure. And you're not going to return enough rare earth. Nobody's going to get a rebate check for, you know, their cesium. or whatever it is, that they're going to, you know, supposedly get up there. So how do you sell that to people? And I think this is one of those things that mercifully, even if he starts to rumble toward it, will peter out. But maybe that's, maybe that's some of the same wishful thinking that got us here.

Yeah, that's what worries me. And I think you are 100% on point to bring up the tech aspect of this and beyond the rare earth elements. There are these tech bros who are enamored of Greenland for various reasons. One is the possibility of setting up some sort of fascist libertarian homestead, I guess, a city or whatever. And another one is the guy who founded Praxis. The Klingon Energy Moon? Yes. He wants to build a city in Greenland and call it Terminus, which is Elon Musk's plan for Mars, and actually sort of recreate what life on Mars would be like so that we can learn from it before we actually go to Mars. So there's this tech fascination with Greenland,

and I think you're absolutely right in saying that somehow that seeped into Donald Trump's head and then, you know, came out the other side as we need Greenland. That's a wonderful tech thought experiment, too. Like, we're going to learn how to live in a place that has no atmosphere that is, that will hold back radioactive rays

and doesn't have abundant water or oxygen. We're going to simulate that by living in a place that has all of them. Also, what a slap in that. the face to the people of Greenland. Right. Well, I think they're holding their own so far. Like, nobody's opening the door when Usha and J.D. are American gothic king out there on the dormant, hoping that you'll open the door and ask him, you know, do you have any sovereignty that

you're selling? The 55,000 strong Greenlanders, smaller than almost any New York neighborhood. Folks, I am very happy to welcome to the new abnormal. an activist, the founder of Black Lives Matter Canada, and the author of the new book Defund Black Lives, Policing and Safety for All. Sandy Hudson, welcome. I want to start off because I think that it is important and incredibly important, particularly now for us here in the States as we are just, you know, beating back against

autocracy, re-segregation that the Trump administration is issuing in. casual light issues. Just casual lightness, if you will. Talk to us about Black Lives Matter Canada and when you founded it and maybe some distinctions between Black Lives Matter Canada and Black Lives Matter here in the States. Sure. And I appreciate you speaking to a Canadian during these like really difficult times for our country's relationships. We started Black Lives Matter Toronto back in 2014. And what was happening at that time, you know, Michael Brown had just been murdered by police, but also there was a man named Germain Carby, who was murdered by police in a suburb of Toronto called Brampton. And what we were seeing and kind of how anti-black racism works in Canada,

was that the news in Canada was focused a lot on Michael Brown. And even though what had happened to Jermaine Carby was similarly suspicious. There were like suspicions that the police had planted a knife. There wasn't much coverage of his case. His case had happened just before Michael Brown's case. So it was also very strange that in Canada, there would be all of this focus as to what's happening in the United States, but no coverage, virtually no coverage of what was happening in Canada. And kind of the way that anti-black racism will play itself out in Canada. And I know that this is also common in the United Kingdom is there's a lot of pointing to the United States of like, look how bad that place is. Oh, interesting.

As a way to sort of hide what is happening locally. And so our group started with an action that was around the same time as the global calls to action for Michael Brown. But we tied it in with Germain Carby and his family was a part of coordinating that first action. And our demands were directed to Canadian governments, to Toronto jurisdictions, to say, like, we have these same issues here. And you folks aren't paying attention. And that is completely unacceptable. It's so interesting that you say that the United States is kind of used as like a distraction, if you will, from what is happening in Canada and what has happened in the UK as it pertains to their anti-blackness. And I feel like here in the United States, we always point to Canada as like, look at all the things that they're doing right. Why can't we be like them?

So it's like a very interesting relationship. But I want to talk to you about your book and particularly the title, Defund, which has become very much of a lightning rod inside of the United States. Following the murder of George Floyd, it had once again gained traction. And I think that there was this purposeful misunderstanding of what it meant to defund the police that spread all around this country. And now people keep that term at arm's length. Speak to us about how you defined defund the police. I'm so glad that you said it was purposeful, but this idea that people misunderstood what it meant was purposeful. Because I believe so too.

You know, there's a lot of discussion right now in this sort of fascist. era that has that we've entered in the United States about defunding NPR. There isn't, you know, the same sort of fervor of like, what does defund mean? Because people do know what it means. To me, defunding is just what it says. It's, it's, it's removing resources from policing. Now, I'm an abolitionist. So I believe that policing shouldn't exist. And to me, defunding is a strategy towards achieving that. And so I think it's pretty clear. I think what folks who were like,

what does it mean were really saying was that they didn't really agree or they thought that it was so ludicrous that they couldn't really give it the time of day. And I think what 2020 did was crack open space for abolitionists to start having these conversations for real. Like, what are the police doing that is benefiting our society

and is the cost? worth any benefit that they may provide. And I think that one of the frustrating pieces to me about the pushback against the narrative of defund the police was this idea that somehow more policing increases safety, which I have always thought, and I mean, there are so many data points that will lift up that it's bullshit, that this idea that if you want a safer community, you need to add more police. And yet I can look to many wealthy, white, suburban areas in this country where you would never see a police officer unless they're walking into the local shop to go pick up a coffee. You're not seeing them on the corners.

You're not seeing them throw up groups of three white boys against a fence, patting them down to ensure the safety of the white community. So can you speak to this idea that somehow defunding the police would result? in more crime when in fact you can look into areas that have minimal police presence and yet do not have high crime. You're exactly right. Think about the safest communities, the safest spaces that you know, are they teeming with cops? No, no, obviously not. And even if we think about spaces that have become slowly policed in the last few decades like schools. The heaviest presence of police in schools tends to be where there are more black students, students of color, immigrant students, but the wealthiest, the whitest, the most private elite schools, are they teeming with police?

No, they're not. Policing does not have anything to do with safety. What it has to do with is social control. And if we really want to make our communities safe, we can look to some of those other really safe communities to see what it is that they have, that communities that are decidedly unsafe or thought of as unsafe don't have. And by and large, Danielle, that's resources. Resources. Yep. And we're putting so much resources into cops. There's none left over for these communities. And I also think at a time in the U.S. where the Trump administration, the Trump regime, is working overtime to erase any presence of the black experience, black excellence, people of color, queer people, women, et cetera, from not only our history books, but our institutions.

I think that it's important for people to understand the history behind policing, which again, we conveniently forget, that policing was something that was formed out of slave patrols. So can you speak to that and how you think that, moving forward, we kind of reclaim the narrative around policing and what you have referred to, I think, as copaganda and what many refer to as copaganda, this idea that we need to bolster the presence of the cops and the way in which we see them in television shows and in Hollywood productions, et cetera. Yeah, it's really quite something how we feel as though like in society just generally, there's this idea that policing has always existed and it will always exist,

and it's always looked this way, and it's always meant to be to serve and protect. But actually, policing is a fairly young institution in its modern configuration, and its purposes when it started out, what it was for was very clearly to, one, support the institution of slavery. Two, was to ensure that colonial expansion had a almost paramilitary force that was able to carry it out. And three, when it came to industrialization and the implementation of the wage, which again is a fairly recent thing in our society, making sure that business people, their stuff was protected from their workers, who workers used to have a closer relationship to the things that they produced and were often paid in part by just taking parts of what they produced.

And so policing was also implemented to make sure that workers couldn't do that. When you look at those three things, those three major things that policing was for, and then the fourth was actually morality policing. So making sure that people weren't drinking during prohibition, making sure that people weren't gambling out in the streets and stuff like that. When you look at those four things, it's about social control. It's about making sure that people who weren't free were always going to be returned back to their masters to work. It was about making sure that people whose land

colonizers were stealing were not able to go back to their land. It was about making sure that workers were under the control of their bosses and making sure that we could implement this very strict moral code. What about that has anything to do with safety? Nothing. Nothing. Zero. Zero. And so to me, it is so important, and that's part of the reason why I wrote this book, that people understand that where policing seems to be failing at safety, it's still doing really, really well at executing its original purposes. And so doesn't that tell us something? Like, why would we try so hard to excavate something good from something that was always so ugly and wrong? I mean, that's a question.

Because, I mean, because it's, you know, because it's been working. You know, oftentimes we will say things like, you know, the system is broken, the system is broken. And I'm always of the mindset that, no, the system is working exactly how the system was designed to work. That's right. And I think that it's important for folks to understand that the structures that we try really desperately to reform and use the word reform is to say that there is something that is good

inside of the system, that we can just, you know, take what is there and try and make it better, as opposed to this system does not work at all for who we are as a country now or who we are as a global community now. And we actually need to imagine something different. And I think that that, to me, is where the alternatives, these community-based alternatives come from, is this idea that we need to radically create different structures, not just kind of take this blob and form it into something else that still has the remnants of what it was inside. And so, Sandy, what does it mean to have these alternatives and what are some of the alternatives to the brutal system of policing? Yeah. And, you know, thank you for mentioning that because so many people over the decades have tried to

reform policing. You can go back. to reports that have been written about policing to like the 1800s, the literal 1800s. And they read like they were written five years ago. It's like the same stuff over there. You know, maybe we should have more training and maybe we should have like an independent review board and maybe we should. And these reports, they just repeat in this cycle over and over and over again. There is no reforming it.

It has been tried. It's been tried. And so there are these alternatives that people are building. And like one, for example, that I want to talk about is some of the stuff that has been happening in Oregon, these non-police civilian responses to mental health calls in particular, where people who are health care providers will go and provide support to people who call for support when they're having a mental health crisis. And in addition, there are some strong.

street teams that have been implemented in Oregon, Arizona, in Toronto, my hometown, where people who are unhoused receive support from civilian services rather than being rounded up and arrested by police. The thing that's like really distressing to me in this period, though, Danielle, is that some of these, these programs are very, very new. And some of them have just started in the last three years and we're seeing some Republican lawmakers look at them after three years and being like, well, this hasn't eliminated the drug problem. We need to eliminate this program and go back to policing. And what's really, really frustrating is that policing has had like a good 150 years to fail over and over and over again. I know that's right. And, you know, we've got like three years of

trying something new where it looks like it's like really positive. And in some, they're already trying to dismantle that. And I think that that's one of the things that we as progressive people have to focus on right now is making sure that these programs are spreading rather than being taken down. I think that that is so correct that for some reason, we believe that a problem that has been hundreds of years in the making is somehow going to be resolved in a two, five or, you know, year initiative, right? Like, also

be successful without the amount of funding that the police departments around the country receive. I'm in New York, and New York has one of the largest police budgets that, like, rivals a small

fucking nation. Right? At $6 billion, there's something astronomical. And when you look in comparison to police, budgets to again schooling budgets, community resources, it is laughable to think that, oh, we're coming up with these new ideas, but you're not going to fund them with the fervor that you do the police

department, but yet you want them to accomplish what the police have been able to destroy in centuries. It doesn't make sense. So as we close out, Sandy, I want to ask you, what are your hopes that people take away with your book defund and how they can use it as we move forward. Well, look, during 2020, I was, you know, just as much as anyone else who was listening to some of the rhetoric around the idea of defund, I was a bit frustrated that it seemed as though some of the conversations that we were having were just not sophisticated, you know, like defund is not just a slogan. Like, there is a rich history of abolitionist work that has its roots in resisting the awfulness of policing, which is just one part of this,

this massive carceral system in industry. And I wanted to make sure that, you know, coming out of 2020, I knew there was going to be a backlash, because if you're a student in history, you know there's going to be a backlash, period. I didn't want us to slide back. I want people to have the tools and the knowledge to push this idea forward. I don't want us to get back into that cycle.

So my hopes for the book are that people do learn a bit about that history, but also learn about why the things, things that have been tried over and over again won't work and can't work. And some of the ideas that people are implementing right now to create safety in their communities that have nothing to do with policing. At the end of the day, my book is really quite hopeful. It is hoping and dreaming for something different and for something that is very, very practical. And I really hope that that's what people take away from my book. Amazing. And again, folks, the book is Defund Black Lives, Policing and Safety for All. Sandy Hudson, thank you so much for making

the time for the new abnormal. And thank you, honestly, for writing this book and delving back into a conversation that I think is really important for us to be having, particularly in this moment. Really appreciate you. Thank you so much, Danielle. Thanks for having me. I really appreciate it. authoritarianism, oligarchism, call it what you will. We're living in it now. And my next guest explains why two distinct groups of images that are everywhere online are, in fact, both perfectly emblematic of the moment. Brian Merchant is a former Los Angeles Times tech columnist and author of the great history of the Luddites, Blood in the Machine, the Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech. He's also the publisher of a fantastic newsletter at bloodin the machine.com,

which is where he wrote about this and kind of deconstructed it. Brian, thanks so much for coming back, man. Always a pleasure. Thanks for having me. So let's start by identifying these two groups of images, or, as you call them, two genres of images. What are they? Yeah, I just started noticed that if I, when I shut the feed, when we can finally, you know, bring ourselves to do that to log off. Like, I feel like the after image that I see, there's two kinds. And I just started thinking about this as I was trying to go to sleep one night and increasingly,

difficult endeavor in these times. But we got images of, you know, migrants and students increasingly now getting handcuffed, shackled, thrown into vans, detainees. Now we have, I think before, while I was writing this, I didn't even have sort of what has become maybe the best example, this genre of image, which is Christy Noam going to El Salvador and standing in front of whether it was the actual migrants or a, you know, what a green screen of migrants. I know there's a lot of online chatter. But still, the image was the point. She's standing there creating content in front of imprisoned men, imprisoned so-called terrorists

or men who have been, you know, a lot of them deported, detained by the United States government, many without due process. And the spectacle, the spectacle of this shackling, of this rounding up, of this mass deportation, the Trump administration promised. So, and, you know, maybe the most glaring example were the actual sort of photos that were disseminated by the El Salvador government. They actually produced these things. They wanted to show when those Venezuelan migrants that are allegedly associated with the gang, you know, were deported from the United States without due process and wound up in this mega detention center. They wanted to make a big show of it, right?

So they had a professional photographer kind of get the right angles and show the men with bags over. their heads being, you know, led in a line sort of just like sort of being cowed before authoritarianism. And that was the point. So that's one genre of image, like sort of, you know, state power, shackling anyone who doesn't belong, who's not supposed to be here, who's, you know, increasingly just sort of the definition of that is being expanded by this administration, right, to student protesters. Maybe you wrote an op-ed and you're a student visa and you're a student from Turkey. Well, now you can get thrown into a van in broad daylight and, you know, shipped off to Louisiana, I think it is, miles and miles away from your home. So these images are just tumbling down the feed on one end.

And then the response has been sort of to protest Tesla, right, has become sort of the attack surface of sorts for protesters because of, again, this new American oligarchy that you mentioned. And it's emerging in this new sort of formation, even though sort of the power structure has been there for a long time. Now it's just plain as day, right? Elon is in there and he's just sort of calling the shots. He's telling Doge to go after this government agency or to cut this many jobs or he's on Twitter sort of helping further the Trump administration's agenda. And so protesters have sort of gathered, you know, famously at the Tesla takedowns. There have been actions in D.C. and at the White House, there's been AOC and Bernie Sanders sort of doing their fight, the oligarchy tour, but maybe most potently and most sort of noticeably there's been the vandalism against Tesla cars, superchargers, and dealerships.

So we're getting these images kind of of this sort of these spasms of resistance on the feed. And those are, I think, to me, kind of stand out as sort of, you know, the twin visual features. of this new American oligarchy. Yeah. So, you know, you talk about this first group of photos, these sort of these haunting, horrifying, infuriating images we see of people in shackles, mostly brown or black people in shackles. Or as you say, we see them behind bars being used as props for Christy Knoam,

like some kind of insanely fucked up TikTok challenge. And like you say, though, there's a point to all this. There's a point to the not talking about what they're actually doing, but the images of what they're doing, there's absolutely a point to why these are being disseminated, right? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, part of that new oligarchic formation, right, with a tech CEO, a tech leader,

a tech billionaire, the richest man in the world at the helm, is he owns a social media network, right, that has now become sort of the de facto propaganda platform for the Republican Party. And he has sort of in concert with, the right sort of shaped the sense of what kind of, you know, images that will be promoted. And so he is ultimately sort of giving the thumbs up by sort of by creating the algorithmic incentives and by sharing things directly on his platform. And so what he and Trump and this new regime have agreed

they want to sort of put forward is this, you know, this very anti-immigrant agenda, this sort of proclamation that they will deport at will and that then that they will crush dissenters. And so that imagery is really important in sort of broadcasting the fact that they're willing to sort of trample due process, that they're willing to use force, that they're willing to shove you into a van in broad daylight. They must have known, right? If you're accosting a student in 2025, detaining them, handcuffing them, throwing them into a van, I mean, this is, we know how media.

the world is, they know, they know that this video's going to get out and go around and they don't care. And in fact, they want it to, right? Just like the El Salvador government wants to broadcast its ruthlessness, its power, its potency, and willingness to sort of abet these impulses of the American state. Yeah, I mean, look, the very fact that the ice thugs pulled up their neck gaiters over their faces lets you know that they, at the very least, they assumed someone was recording them or taking pictures, so they very, very bravely covered their faces. You're absolutely right. This is what they want. And it kind of, to me, it almost signifies a move even beyond the now famous Adam Serwer line. The cruelty is the point. And it's kind of moved into the dehumanization

is the point. Yeah. I would agree with that 100%. I mean, it is the point because it's pretty much all that they have right now, right? They have to sort of broadcast. this power. They have this this moment where they have a little bit of of momentum. You know, they obviously the margins by which they won the election are not as wide as as they say they are. But they're using that as justification to try to ram through a lot of this extremely unpopular stuff. And they're, of course, trying to do it all at the same time. And, you know, flooding the zone with images is just part of that effect. And they want to make clear that this is possible that that anybody can wind up in shackles if you're falling out of line, if you're dissenting against the regime.

I mean, right now, it's limited to students here on foreign visas and it's limited to migrants. But I think part of the weight and part of the thrust of all of this and part of Elon Musk going on Fox News and saying, we're going to go after the people who are organizing these protests against Tesla is intimidation on the one hand. And then when you can look at the feed and you can see and sort of process and engage with the extent of dehumanization that they are willing to put people through, I think it helps that blow land more forcefully. It really does sort of have a chilling effect. I know people who are reluctant to go out and protest even if they are American citizens because I went to a Tesla takedown protest this weekend. And my partner was like, I don't know if we should go and bring. the kids and I was like, ah, you know, the proud boys are saying they're going to show up and

intimidate folks and there's going to be force and, you know, it's all, there's, there are people for hungry for that kind of dehumanization, too, or to be able to enact it. And it sort of also emboldens them too. So it is serving. And it's just, it is also, it's so dark. It's so, what we're talking about right now is what makes this so much worse than last time. When you saw a policy agenda put forth that was reprehensible, right? You saw the Muslim ban attempted and the attempts to sort of make clear what the policy was going to be and it was retributive against certain groups. But this time, they're really leaning into the mediation and they don't care. They'll, you know, that just over the last few days, there's been this like giblification trend where tech guys are taking, you know, photos and turning them into studio gibli's type films.

And before long, like the White House itself took a photo of a woman being arrested and rounded up for deportation and crying with, you know, an agent of the state sort of shackling her turned it into Studio Ghibli image. Like it's almost like anything is fair game now. They will demoralize you. They will humiliate you. They will broadcast it to a platform with access to hundreds of millions of people. That's the difference this time, I think, to me. Absolutely. And Tesla really has become basically almost like a ground zero for protesting and resistance.

Talk a little more about how we got here. Yeah. I mean, Tesla is the most important sort of plank of Musk's empire, right? He got rich first through PayPal and then he furthered his success with SpaceX. But Tesla is sort of the brand that he's still most famous for and that most of his wealth is tied up in. To put it in sort of the bullet pointed terms just really quickly is that Tesla did a really interesting thing, right? It made electric cars and it did so quite successfully for a while. I mean, it had a rocky start. It got a lot of state help. It, you know, is indebted to the Obama

administration for its very existence, but we don't even need to go into all that. Right. The fact is, is that it was a functional company. It was, you know, doing okay. It was doing pretty well. It was always somewhat volatile, somewhat unstable. But then Musk realizes at some point that he can continue to sort of make new promises. First, he makes the promise of, oh, well, we'll have electric cars, but then we'll have supercharger stations. Anywhere you can get gas, you can get supercharged. And just at the same time that you can fill up your car with gas, you can get a full charge and be on your way. And investors really like that.

And they responded to it. And he never really built a legitimate supercharger network. but he saw that by saying so he could get the stock price to rise. And then so he gets in this pattern, this cycle of making these huge promises like full self-driving, which he made 10 years ago now that you can, you know, and he markets it as full self-driving, you know, giving the impression that you can have your hands off the wheel. But the important thing is when he does that, investors love it. And they inflate the value of Tesla even more, they pour more money into it.

So over and over and most recently, I think he, you know, he did this big event in Burbank, where he's got, you know, robot butlers and, you know, cyber taxis and like this little carnival of the future that he's promising investors. And again, the stock keeps going up. The problem is he's not selling the same number more cars that would justify the stock level. So it's all bound up. And his wealth is largely speculative, right? So it's in this very weird place where he's got an enormous amount of wealth bound up in this kind of like imaginary idea that Tesla is going to any day now deliver a vast supercharger network, 100% self-driving cars, robot butlers, cyber taxis, all of these things.

And those are nowhere to be found. And so he's kind of running out of road. So the Tesla take down guys are saying, well, this kind of leaves him vulnerable, right? Like the stock can't stay up that high forever if he's not actually delivering all this stuff. But what's interesting right now is so that. That's where we kind of left off with Musk right before Trump was elected. And, you know, he's the first buddy and he's now in the White House. So he's kind of made the next jump.

And his next big promise is basically like, I'm going to wield state power, right? And so now he's manning Doge. He's making a bunch of sort of top-level executive decisions with Trump and some would say for Trump. And he's positioning himself to sort of rake in even more government contracts, especially through SpaceX and Starlink, but perhaps through Tesla as well. And this is still leaving him in a pretty brittle point as far as investors are concerned. So he has to operate as this weirdly kind of liquid oligarch. So he has to care about Tesla's stock price.

Because if it tanks, then that eliminates a lot of his wealth. And then that eliminates a lot of the reason that the right is so enamored of him in the first place. He's the richest guy in the world. That's pretty much it. That's why Trump likes him, right? He's kind of a weird, weepy guy who, you know, you can see him online. I just sort of, you know, just so aggrieved over everything going on Fox News, on the brink of tears, you know, complaining about Tim Walls, like, you know, making fun of Tesla and that's how it's the worst thing. Even though he's just like waving a chainsaw, making fun of all the jobs that he's cut just a week or two ago.

Like, he's just, it's, he's this bizarre character who becomes very unlikeable if he's not wealthy, if he's not successful. So this is sort of our driving ruling force right now. And, you know, it's a lot like Trump himself, right? Where they're both sort of, yes, they have real wealth, but yes, a lot of that wealth is also dependent on convincing everybody else that they are wealthy, that they are powerful, that they deserve to sort of commandeer the state and make executive decisions like this that can then further enrich themselves, right? So it's this weird oligarchic House of Cards, if you will. And the, you know, the difference this go around again, is that they have this very public-facing propaganda platform in the form of X, so they can at least sort of drive their narrative and drive it hard. And, you know, we can debate how successful it is, but it's still reaching hundreds of millions of people. And having red blood in the machine, I mean this in a complementary way. I feel like the Luddites would have been proud of the Tesla protests. Am I wrong? No, 100%. The Tesla protests are absolutely sort of a Luddite action in that they are identifying the source of this concentration.

traded power that is attempting to use technology as a lever against ordinary people, against working people, right? Like, what does Musk do when he's in government now? He's saying, oh, well, I'm going to swing this wrecking ball through this department and that department, and then I'm going to cut half the staff, and I'm going to replace them with AI. Never mind that, like, this is all a fantasy, and you're just destroying institutional knowledge and, you know, the function of the government. It's just, right, it's this promise that you can sort of consolidate power even further into a smaller number of hands. It just means Musk has more power himself. Trump has more power themselves and they can then replace anybody with loyalists.

But again, it's that act of using technology or even just the promise of technology as a way to sort of justify seizing power and then wielding it over other people. That's exactly what the Luddites were fighting against. And that's exactly what Tesla takedown protesters are. fighting against too. Yeah, the Luddites would be out in front of the Tesla dealerships 100%. They might even be the ones burning the cars, but they might be the ones burning the cars rocking down. Yeah, but, you know. Brian, it's always fantastic to have you on. This was such a good conversation. I just, I love talking to you. Folks, if you're not reading Brian's newsletter at blood against the machine.com, you should be. And if you haven't read the book,

blood, did I say blood against the machine? Yeah, that's a good title too, but it's blood in the machine. I have rage against the machine in my head these days for some odd reason. Blood in the Machine.com. And the book is Blood in the Machine, the origins of the rebellion against Big Tech, and could not recommend either one of them more highly. Brian, thanks so much for being here. Well, thanks so much for having me, Andy.

It's always a blast. Jeblund, Andrew Levy. Why do you keep calling me, Andrew? Because it's funny. All right. We'll have words about this off air. Who's your fuck-that-guy for today? My fuck-that-guy for today is every attendee of the natalism conference in Austin, Texas.

Do you hear about this? Did you see this? Have you heard about this? So if you're wondering if the natalism conference has a creepy element, let me refer you to a comment from the organizer, Kevin Dolan, father of six. He said that the pro-natalist movement and the eugenics movement are very much aligned. Okay. So, I mean, I have a lot of questions about this conference. I don't have a lot of like that I'm really too terribly concerned about argumentatively. I think we kind of need to stay in the fuck no and fuck that guy sort of space here. Like my questions for it are, you know, it's in Austin. I wonder

if it's at any of the facilities owned and operated by the University of Austin. is that Barry Weiss's university? Is that? It is, but this is at University of Texas at Austin, right? Oh, the real one. Yeah, yeah. With the program. Yes. Yeah. So people pay like $10,000 to talk about strategies for having lots of kids and meeting people who are into having lots of kids and I guess, you know, making a little, making their own brace of junior Julius strikers at home. But the problem with this conference, and this is really kind of where I'm, I want to dwell is inherent in the structure, which is that if you have $10,000 to go to a conference, you can meet somebody. You don't need the conference. Like, if you have that kind of disposable income because you're like, you know what I want to do is I want to repopulate the earth, but with just a small set of genes from this one race,

like you've got the time and the financial wherewithal to not need this conference. So as much as like this is fundamentally disturbing that this shit is out in the open, that like 15 years ago, if you told me that there was going to be, if you told anybody, there was going to be a natalism conference where the organizer is like, yes, we're actually deeply implicated in eugenics, and that's good. Like, those people would not be allowed out in public for a while. Like, they wouldn't be going to nice dinners anywhere where you could take snaps of them. Like, they're not going to be in gossip magazines. That's troubling. But I kind of, you know, the part where I calm down a little is just by its very nature, just by the structure.

of what's happening here. I just feel like you don't have to worry about these people because they're spending $10,000 to get into eugenics when it's like, it's clear that they could just go buy what they needed from other people. It's not that hard. There are a lot of people willing to sell out for stuff that is, you know, even uglier and not nearly as rewarding. Just go buy a mate. Like, do you have to go, do you need like a fucking lanyard for that? Look, if that's your kink. Yeah, I suppose. I don't. I suppose. On the other hand, you couldn't just take, well, you probably could. I was going to say you couldn't just take $10,000 and get to hear Jack Posobiac give a speech.

But then I realized, of course you could. You could probably give him $150 and get to hear a speech. These people are so horny for attention, right? Like, they're on YouTube. Just try a couple of searches first. They're out there for free. Do we know if that couple with the really obnoxious glasses? Simone and Malcolm Collins.

I believe their names are. Who get profiled every 10 days or so by some kind of major media organization? Were they there? Honestly, I don't know if they could get. So they have to stop every 30 miles or so to switch horses. Oh, that's a good point. You know, it really depends on when they set out and what their weather was like. We've had some cold snaps.

Yeah, those Mealskin canteens only hold so much water. it's embarrassing that we stumbled on that given that like you said there's just with the lunar cycle there's another like former hurst property like writing. God. Yeah, fuck those guys. So Andy Levy. Yes. Who's your fuck that guy?

Thank you for saying Andy. You're welcome. I give back. I take a little. I give a little. So Amber Ruffin. She is not my fuck that guy. Let me make that clear.

She had been selected to do the sort of roast or whatever you call it at the White House Correspondence Association dinner. Every year they have this thing down in D.C. It's gross. I should start off by saying that. But every year they do have a comedian who gets to do a, I don't know, 15 minute or so act in front of a bunch of people who basically spend the whole time looking at them sternly and shaking their heads. And so it was supposed to be Amber Ruffin this year. And it was announced over the weekend that

the White House Correspondents Association has canceled her appearance and that they are not going to be having a comedian at this year's dinner. So apparently, the problem stems from something Ruffin said on a podcast put out by The Daily Beast, the Daily Beast, the Daily Beast podcast. you're complicit. She said on this podcast, she basically said that she was not going to target both sides of the aisle in a like manner,

even though she had been instructed to do so by the WHCA. She said that in her mind, the Trump administration are, quote, kind of a bunch of murderers. And that playing to both sides, quote, makes them feel like human beings, but they shouldn't get to feel that way

because they're not. And this caused outrage from the group that pretends that facts don't care about your feelings, but that very, very much gets their feelings hurt almost every day, and, you know, they like to whine about how they're persecuted. In response, Eugene Daniels, who is a political correspondent for MSNBC and the president of the White House Correspondents Association, he said, I wanted to share that the board has unanimously decided we are no longer featuring a comedic performance this year. At this consequential moment for journalism,

I want to ensure the focus is not on the politics of division, but entirely on awarding our colleagues for their outstanding work, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Again, there is that word division. I talked about this earlier, about every time you hear about division or divisiveness or whatever. It's always from one side. The right is never divisive. And there it is again. And Eugene Daniels, I was going to say,

They should know better. He does know better. Obviously, there were political reasons behind this, but it is absolutely shameful that they're doing this. And it feels less like the White House Correspondents Association and more like the White House Collaborationists Association. And the idea that these journalists have to placate the Trump administration is so foul to me. And it mirrors what we have seen from a lot of the mainstream legacy media from the New York Times, from the Washington Post not endorsing a presidential candidate and changing up their editorial page. This dinner is, it's sort of a, in my opinion, anyway, it's a pox on journalism to begin with.

It's a bunch of people patting themselves, dressing up in tuxes and patting themselves on the back. And basically, it's just, it's smarmy to me. It's antithetical to what journalism should be about. And so I don't like it to begin with. I like calling it the nerd prom, which is the name that arose a bunch of years ago, only because it really seems to annoy them. They really don't like it. So I feel like it's useful. Look, as far as Amber Ruffin is concerned, I think this is a blessing for her, as I sort of alluded to earlier, it's next to impossible for that crowd to be good for a comedian. They're just too full of smug self-importance and they don't like jokes made at their expense. And it is, and they are afraid to laugh at certain things because, I don't know, maybe one of their sources in the White House dining room might see them laughing and not tell them when the clam chowder is on the menu. So I think ultimately this is a win for Amber Ruffin to not have to do this. What she should do,

which a bunch of people have put forth, is she should just post what she was going to do on YouTube. Yeah. And she should do it during the White House correspondence dinner. And I am certain that that would get more views than the C-SPAN coverage of the dinner itself, which is unwatchable other than possibly the comedian depending on who it is. So anyway, long story, my fuck that guy for this day is the White House Correspondents Association. Fuck those guys. Yeah, I think that's completely right on. Like, hey, listen, if journalism is the first draft of history and if history can't be divisive, we shouldn't even be having any part of the—nobody should speak at the dinner. Everybody should just be glad to be there and commemorate history passing by. And it's funny, like,

that they hate nerd prom. This is the other thing. It's like the people running it, like the White House Correspondents Association, like it didn't matter. This was not a thing that mattered until about 15 years ago when the people who coined nerd prom covered it like crazy because it was something you could blog about. Right. You know, it's a product of, you know, the sort of the net roots nation's sort of blogging era of political writing that elevated this into something that mattered. The last time it really did was Stephen Colbert, although maybe you can say in Trump's first term when Michelle Wolf did the I joke about Sarah Huckabee Sanders and everybody got outraged about that. It's really only two times that it mattered. So if it can be elevated out of nowhere when nobody cared, you can just bury it again.

If you're not, if you don't have the stones to live according to ostensibly the purpose of your profession in holding this, then just don't and let it slink below, you know, sink below the surface. Nobody's going to miss anything. Hope you enjoy checking out this episode of the new abnormal. We're back every Tuesday, Friday, and Sunday. If you enjoyed it, please share it with a friend and keep the conversation going. This podcast is a Daily Beast production with production by Jesse Cannon and Seamus Calder. Want more great listens? Check out our comedy podcast, The Last Laugh, and our star-studded The Daily Beast podcast at the Daily Beast.com slash podcasts. If you enjoyed this episode, consider becoming a Daily Beast subscriber.

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